Greek orthography#Digraphs and diphthongs

A digraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. The orthography of Greek includes several digraphs, including various pairs of vowel letters that used to be pronounced as diphthongs but have been shortened to monophthongs in pronunciation. Many of these are characteristic developments of modern Greek, but some were already present in Classical Greek. None of them is regarded as a letter of the alphabet.

During the Byzantine period, it became customary to write the silent iota in digraphs as an iota subscript.

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According to KEME (1983),This book is the official grammar book of Modern Greek edited by a group of experts and it is a revised edition of Triantafillidis (1941, reprint with corrections 1978). the splitting of a Modern Greek word into syllables (syllabification) is governed by the following rules:

• C1: A single consonant between two vowels is hyphenated with the succeeding vowel.
• C2: A sequence of two consonants between two vowels is hyphenated with the succeeding vowel, if a Greek word exists that begins with such a consonant sequence. Otherwise the sequence is split into two syllables.
• C3: A sequence of three or more consonants between two vowels is hyphenated with the succeeding vowel, if a Greek word exists that begins with the sequence of the first two consonants. Otherwise it splits; the first consonant being hyphenated with the preceding vowel.{{Cite journal |last=Noussia |first=Theodora I. |date=1997 |title=A Rule-based Hyphenator for Modern Greek |url=https://aclanthology.org/J97-3001 |journal=Computational Linguistics |volume=23 |issue=3 |pages=361–376}}

Loanword hyphenation is governed by the same grammar rules as the rest of the Standard Modern Greek language.

The prohibitive hyphenation rules regarding vowel splitting are as follows:

• V1. Double-vowel blends do not split.
• V2. The combinations αυ, ευ, ηυ, αύ, εύ and ηύThe ηυ combination is infrequently referred to in grammar books (KEME 1983), possibly because it appears in only a small number of words. However, this combination is also considered, because such words are regularly used e.g., εφηύρα [efívra] 'I invented'. do not split.
• V3. Diphthongs do not split.
• V4. Excessive diphthongs do not split.

All of the above rules are negative in that they indicate impermissible hyphen points within particular substrings of consecutive vowels.

{{main|Greek diacritics}}

Polytonic spelling uses a variety of diacritics to represent aspects of the pronunciation of ancient Greek. Polytonic, along with lowercase letters, became standard in Byzantine Greek, although the ancient distinctions had disappeared, replaced by a simple stress accent. The orthographies of modern Greek, both katharevousa and dhimotiki, used the polytonic system until 1982, when monotonic spelling was introduced. In some conservative contexts, such as the Church, polytonic spellings are still used.

Monotonic orthography, adopted in 1982, replaces the ancient diacritics with just two: the acute accent (tónos, e.g. {{lang|grc|ί}}), used to mark the stressed syllable in polysyllabic words, and the diaeresis (dialytiká, e.g. {{lang|grc|ϊ}}), which indicates that the vowel is not part of a digraph.

Ancient Greek was written as {{lang|la|scripta continua}} without spacing or interpuncts. Over time, a variety of symbols appeared. A system of dots credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium was developed in the 3rd century BC: a low dot {{angle bracket|.}} marked an occasion for a short breath after a short phrase, a middot {{angle bracket|·}} marked an occasion for a longer breath after a longer passage, and a high dot {{angle bracket|˙}} marked a full stop at the end of a completed thought. Other writers employed two dot punctuation {{angle bracket|⁚}} to mark the ends of sentences or changing speakers. Less often, arrangements of three {{angle bracket|⁝}}, four {{angle bracket|⁞ or ⁘}}, and five dots {{angle bracket|⁙}} appeared. Such interline punctuation could be noted or replaced by a variety of {{lang|el-Latn|paragraphoi}}, long marks which trailed between lines of text; these might also mark changes of speakers. Blank lines or various {{lang|el-Latn|coronides}} marked the ends of sections. (A separate {{lang|el-Latn|coronis}} was used to mark contractions; its early forms looked like an apostrophe between the two elided words.) Over time, the main punctuation came to be a full stop marked by a single dot at varying heights, a partial stop marked by various forms of commas, and the {{lang|el-Latn|hypodiastole}} {{angle bracket|⸒}} and papyrological hyphen {{angle bracket| ͜ }}. These served to show whether an ambiguous series of letters should be read as (respectively) a pair of words or as a single word.{{cite web |last= Nicolas |first= Nick |date=2005 |title=Greek Unicode Issues: Punctuation |url= http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/punctuation.htm |work= Thesaurus Linguae Graecae |location= University of California, Irvine |access-date= 2014-10-07 | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20141010180952/http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/punctuation.html | archive-date= 2014-10-10 | url-status= dead}} Later Aristarchus of Samothrace modified this system (see: Aristarchian symbols).

Following the advent of printing, most Greek punctuation was gradually standardized with French: the {{lang|el-Latn|hypodiastole}} was fully unified with the comma, the comma serves as the decimal point (and in this use is called the {{lang|el-Latn|hypodiastole}}) and it also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing {{wikt-lang|el|ό,τι}} ({{lang|el-Latn|ó,ti}}, "whatever") from {{wikt-lang|el|ότι}} ({{lang|el-Latn|óti}}, "that"). The full stop serves as the thousands separator, and guillemets ({{lang|el|εισαγωγικά}} isagoyika) and em-length quotation dashes ({{lang|el|παύλα}} pavla) typically serve to indicate direct speech.{{refn|In informal writing, English-style quotation marks have also become quite common.}} When quotations are nested, double apostrophes and turned commas are used for the embedded quotation or word: {{angle bracket|«…“…”…»}}. Right-pointing double guillemets ({{lang|el|ομειωματικά}} omiomatiká) {{angle bracket|»}} serve as a ditto mark. The principal difference is the Greek question mark {{angle bracket|;}}, which developed a shape so similar to the Latinate semicolon {{angle bracket|;}} that Unicode decomposes its separate code point identically. The {{lang|el-Latn|ano teleia}} middot serves as the Greek semicolon, but is so uncommon that it has often been left off of Greek keyboards.{{cite web |url=http://greek.kanlis.com/script.html |title=The Look of Greek |access-date=8 October 2014 }}

One of the few places where {{lang|el-Latn|ano teleia}} exists is on the Microsoft Windows Polytonic Greek keyboard (having the driver name KBDHEPT.DLL).

The exclamation mark ({{lang|el|θαυμαστικό}} thavmastikó) is mostly used as in English. The hyphen, the brackets, the colon, the ellipsis and the slash are also in use. The slash has the additional function of forming common abbreviations like {{lang|el|α/φοί}} for {{lang|el|αδελφοί}} 'brothers'. The ligature kai (ϗ) is sometimes used for the same function as the English ampersand.

There are special rules for how to write Greek numerals. In modern Greek, a number of changes have been made. Instead of extending an overline over an entire number (like {{overline|χξϛ}}), a {{lang|el-Latn|keraia}} ({{lang|el|κεραία}}, lit. "hornlike projection") is placed to its upper right, a development of the short marks formerly used for single numbers and fractions. The modern {{lang|el-Latn|keraia}} is a symbol (ʹ) similar to the acute accent (´), but has its own Unicode character, encoded as U+0374. Alexander the Great's father Philip II of Macedon is thus known as {{lang|el|Φίλιππος Βʹ}} in modern Greek. A lower left {{lang|el-Latn|keraia}} (Unicode: U+0375, "Greek Lower Numeral Sign") is now standard for identifying thousands: 2015 is represented as ͵ΒΙΕʹ (2000 + 10 + 5).

• Ancient Greek phonology
• Greek braille
• Obelism
• Greek grammar
• Greek language question
• Greek ligatures
• Iota subscript
• Katharevousa
• Modern Greek phonology
• Pronunciation of Ancient Greek in teaching
• Romanization of Greek

• {{cite book|title=Grammatiki tis ellinikis glossas|last2=Mackridge|first2=Peter|last3=Philippaki-Warburton|first3=Irini|publisher=Pataki|year=1998|last1=Holton|first1=David|place=Athens}}
• {{cite book|last1=Keller|first1=Andrew|last2=Russell|first2=Stephanie|date=2012|title=Learn to Read Greek, Part 1|location=New Haven, Connecticut and London, England|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-11589-5}}
• {{cite book|last=Mastronarde|first=Donald J.|author-link=Donald Mastronarde|date=2013|title=Introduction to Attic Greek|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LmdCUAW8FAYC&q=Introduction+to+Attic+Greek+Donald+J.+Mastronarde+textbook|edition=2nd|location=Berkeley, California, Los Angeles, California, and London, England|publisher=University of California Press|isbn=978-0-520-27571-3|access-date=2020-11-11|archive-date=2024-10-07|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20241007005526/https://books.google.com/books?id=LmdCUAW8FAYC&q=Introduction+to+Attic+Greek+Donald+J.+Mastronarde+textbook#v=snippet&q=Introduction%20to%20Attic%20Greek%20Donald%20J.%20Mastronarde%20textbook&f=false|url-status=live}}
• {{cite book|title=The ancient languages of Europe|url=https://archive.org/details/ancientlanguages00wood_845|url-access=limited|last=Woodard|first=Roger D.|publisher=University Press|year=2008|editor-last=Woodard|editor-first=Roger D.|location=Cambridge|pages=[https://archive.org/details/ancientlanguages00wood_845/page/n35 14]–49|chapter=Attic Greek|isbn=9780521684958}}

{{Wiktionary|Appendix:Greek punctuation}}

• [https://archive.today/20120805221509/http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~opoudjis/unicode/unicode.html Greek Unicode Issues] by Nick Nicholas
• [http://www.foundalis.com/lan/grphdetl.htm The Details of Modern Greek Phonetics and Phonology], by Harry Foundalis

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